Page:O Genteel Lady! (1926).pdf/18

 'Not alone,' piped the littlest of the two. 'God cares for us. He loves us.'

'How selfish I am,' thought Lanice, and gave them all her silver.

When they were gone she heard one passenger tell the others that children often rigged up in black and boarded trains and made soft-hearted females give them money. The almost-gentleman laughed loudly and glanced at Lanice. She flushed with chagrin, but remembering their thin hands was glad she had been generous. She moved slightly lest her folded legs should go to sleep. Her head fell back, the pelisse slipped from her shoulders showing the seed pearl brooch at her throat. 'Asleep,' said the man in the muffler, pointing with his thumb.

She was back again in Amherst with Mamma, in the garden of the sumptuous 'villa.' Mamma was pulling up plants by the roots. The roots were hair. She jerked up out of the clotting earth a succession of writhing human bodies.

'Oh, Mamma, stop, please stop! I can't bear it, expeciallyespecially [sic] those purplish ones without any legs!'

Mamma leered at her. Usually the heads were half out of the ground like turnips. Sometimes there was only a head. The most ghastly of all had but a leg and a splay foot.

'Mamma!' The pretty woman chirped and clapped her hands. She wore her fashionable cherry-red pelisse de voyage and whirled her tiny ermine muff. So it was Lanice had last seen her. In the nightmare Mamma pointed at her and the imps fixed